Creating multiple domains with key phrases and linking back and forth to them
-
There are several of my competitors who have built multiple sites with keywords in their domain names such as localaustinplumber.com, houstonplumbers.com, Dallasplumbers.com, localdallasplumbingservices.com...you get the picture. (These are just made up examples to illustrate what they are doing) They put unique content on each page and use alias whois using a different credit card to set up each domain to hide the fact from Google that they are the same entity and then link back and forth to each of the domains with appropriate keywords in the anchor text. They are outranking me on a lot of key search phrases due to the fact that they have the keywords in the domain name. They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own. Is this a good idea? is it black hat? are they going to get slapped if someone reports them as a link farm? It's frustrating for me staying white hat and getting legitimate links and then these competitors come in and out rank me after only a few months with this scheme. Is this a common practice to rank highly for certain key phrases?
Thanks in advance for your opinions!
Ron10
-
Thank you!
-
My Linkscape knowledge comes mostly from a great Help desk response I received from Aaron regarding a question I submitted.
I do not otherwise know the answer to your question.
Aaron Wheeler said:
both Open Site Explorer and the Web App Link Analysis are based on our Linkscape Index of the web. I'm sorry that you haven't been able to see your links in Linkscape. Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Linkscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for a plethora of reasons, including crawl-ability of sites, the amount of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. Just so you know, here's how we do our index: we take the last index, take the 10 billion URLs with the highest mozrank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains), and start crawling from the top-down until we've crawled 40,000,000,000 pages (which is about 1/4 of the amount in Google's index). Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index
We update our Linkscape Index every 3 to 5 weeks. Crawling the whole internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks. And then we've got 1-2 weeks of processing to do on those links to determine which are the most important links etc. You can see a schedule of how often we update, and planned updates here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule
Linkscape focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.
If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.
For now, the best thing you can do to help your domain become indexed is to work on link building for links from sites with high mozrank.
-
Ryan, do you know if redirected links are visible in Linkscape? I am guessing that they are not.
-
They can effectively rank better then other sites which do not use proper SEO practices.
This is a very valid point... and at the same time it is good news if you know more effective methods.
-
Linkscape (SEOmoz tool for crawling links) only includes the top ?30% of web pages and their links. You are not likely to see links to local area plumber sites.
-
Ron,
The tactics your competitors are effective. They can effectively rank better then other sites which do not use proper SEO practices. If your site offers fantastic content combined with solid SEO, then you can blow your competitors sites off the front page of Google.
Your choices are:
-
hire an SEO
-
start with the Beginners Guide to SEO and incorporate every learning into your site
-
join your competitors on trying to work around the system until one of your competitors steps ups and leaves everyone in the dust
-
-
They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own. Are you sure about this?
Yes, or at least there are no other links that the mozbar seomoz link analysis shows, but they don't show all links. Many times it will show no links to a page and then you look up links through the Yahoo links report and will find 20 or 30 links that the mozbar didn't show. Does the mozbar not crawl as deeply as the Yahoo spider does?
-
It's frustrating for me staying white hat and getting legitimate links and then these competitors come in and out rank me after only a few months with this scheme.
You should be praising God that they are wasting their time with all of this domain buying, credit card charging, alias creating, linking back and forth bullcrap. When they start doing something really effective you are in big trouble.
They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own.
Are you sure about this? If they have no links from outside of their own network of sites then links from these domains should be close to zero value. And, if they do have these links from outside of their own niche they would be more effectively used directed to a smaller number of sites - perhaps only their main site.
Is this a common practice to rank highly for certain key phrases?
Its a common practice... but there are better methods of ranking highly.
Is this a good idea?
I think its a good idea to sell to your competitor.
(I know that a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this.... that's OK.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Rank drop after link reclamation
Link reclamation is good activity interms of technical SEO and UX. But I noticed couple of times rank drop post the link reclamation activity. Why does this happen? What might be the cause? Beside redirecting to the most relevant page in contest to the source page content; anything else we must be looking into?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
One page with multiple sections - unique URL for each section
Hi All, This is my first time posting to the Moz community, so forgive me if I make any silly mistakes. A little background: I run a website that for a company that makes custom parts out of specialty materials. One of my strategies is to make high quality content about all areas of these specialty materials to attract potential customers - pretty strait-forward stuff. I have always struggled with how to structure my content; from a usability point of view, I like just having one page for each material, with different subsections covering covering different topical areas. Example: for a special metal material I would have one page with subsections about the mechanical properties, thermal properties, available types, common applications, etc. Basically how Wikipedia organizes its content. I do not have a large amount of content for each section, but as a whole it makes one nice cohesive page for each material. I do use H tags to show the specific sections on the page, but I am wondering if it may be better to have one page dedicated to the specific material properties, one page dedicated to specific applications, and one page dedicated to available types. What are the communities thoughts on this? As a user of the website, I would rather have all of the information on a single, well organized page for each material. But what do SEO best practices have to say about this? My last thought would be to create a hybrid website (I don't know the proper term). Have a look at these examples from Time and Quartz. When you are viewing a article, the URL is unique to that page. However, when you scroll to the bottom of the article, you can keep on scrolling into the next article, with a new unique URL - all without clicking through to another page. I could see this technique being ideal for a good web experience while still allowing me to optimize my content for more specific topics/keywords. If I used this technique with the Canonical tag would I then get the best of both worlds? Let me know your thoughts! Thank you for the help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jaspercurry0 -
Redirecting location-specific domains
I am working on a project for a physician who only cares about reaching patients within a specific geographic region. He has a new technique at his practice and wants to get the word out via radio spots. I want to track the effectiveness of the radio campaigns without the use of call-tracking numbers or special promo codes. Since the physician's primary domain is very long (but well-established), my thought is to register 3-4 short domains referencing the technique and location so they would be easy for listeners to remember and type-in later. 301 these domains to the relevant landing page on the main domain. As an alternative. Each domain could be a single relevant landing page with a link to the relevant procedure on the main site. It's not as if there is anything deceptive going on, rather, I would simply be using a domain in place of a call tracking number. I think I should be able to view the type-in traffic in Analytics, but would Google have an issue with this? Thoughts and suggestions appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SCW0 -
How to Handle Sketchy Inbound Links to Forum Profile Pages
Hey Everyone, we recently discovered that one of our craft-related websites has a bunch of spam profiles with very sketchy backlink profiles. I just discovered this by looking at the Top Pages report in OpenSiteExplorer.org for our site, and noticed that a good chunk of our top pages are viagra/levitra/etc. type forum profile pages with loads of backlinks from sketchy websites (porn sites, sketchy link farms, etc.). So, some spambot has been building profiles on our site and then building backlinks to those profiles. Now, my question is...we can delete all these profiles, but how should we handle all of these sketchy inbound links? If all of the spam forum profile pages produce true 404 Error pages (when we delete them), will that evaporate the link equity? Or, could we still get penalized by Google? Do we need to use the Link Disavow tool? Also note that these forum profile pages have all been set to "noindex,nofollow" months ago. Not sure how that affects things. This is going to be a time waster for me, but I want to ensure that we don't get penalized. Thanks for your advice!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
IS there such a thing as a Link Juice Viewer?
Hi, I am managing the tech and SEO for an ecommerce site with a big mega menu with over 140 cats/subcats and well, I know that my link juice is diluted and am thinking of cutting back on the categories but in the meantime. Is there a link juice visualizer? How can I see in a visual format how linkjuice is flowing through the site? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Link Farms and The Relationship between 2 domain with a 301 Redirect
I have an interesting scenario: Domain A was worked on by a disreputable SEO company off shore. The owner of Domain A came to me for my assistance and evaluation on how the off shore company was doing. I concluded that he should terminate the relationship immediately. One of the bad things they did was register Domain A with a LOT of link farms. I started working on a new site that eventually we decided to go with Domain B (a better, but totally related domain name to Domain A). I added a nice new site and had my client write clean, relevant information for it. We've done all legitimate, above ground by-google's-recommendation SEO for Domain B. I have a series of 301 redirects from Domain A to Domain B. Since April 24th, organic search results have plummeted. I see many incoming links via Webmaster Tools as the massive link farms, but those link farms have Domain A in their databases, not Domain B. My question: is Domain B inheriting the link juice from Domain A insofar as the incoming links are showing up in Webmaster Tools as directly related to Domain A? Should I sever the ties with Domain A altogether? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KateZDCA1 -
Penguin Update and Infographic Link Bait
Is it still ok to use infographics for link bait now that the penguin update has rolled out? Are there any techniques that should be avoided when promoting an infographic? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eddiejsd1 -
Anchor text for internal links
there has been a lof of discussion on this forum and elsewhere about over optimized anchor text, partial match anchor text vs exact anchor text match, etc. I am wondering iwhether or not exact anchor text matches are good or bad for internal links? Does anyone have anythoughts, or better, any studies? Paul
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diogenes0